MamaBlogger365 – On the Deep Kindness of Parent by Blaze Rose

The most basic human virtue is reverence for one’s father and mother. The Buddha regarded filial piety as absolutely essential to a moral life.

“There are two persons who you can never repay. They are your mother and father. Even if you were to carry your mother on one shoulder and your father on the other for one hundred years, and they should even void their excrement there; and if you should attend to them, anointing them with salves, massaging, bathing and rubbing their limbs, even that would not repay them.”

And in the following passage for the Sutra of the Deep Kindness of Parent and the Difficulty of Repaying It, the Buddha poignantly describes what parents do for their children.

“For ten (lunar) months while the mother carries the child, she feels discomfort each time she rises, as if she were lifting a heavy burden. Like a chronic invalid, she is unable to keep down her food and drink. When the ten months have passed and the time comes for giving birth, she undergoes much pain and suffering so that the child can be born. She fears for her own life, like a pig or lamb waiting to be slaughtered. Then the blood flows all over the ground. There are the sufferings she undergoes. Once the child is born, she saves the sweet for it and swallows the bitter herself. She carries the child and nourishes it, washing away its filth. There is no toil or difficulty she does not willingly undertake for the sake of her child. She endures both cold and heat and never mentions what she has gone through. She gives the dry place to her child and sleeps in the damp herself. For three years she nourishes the baby with milk, transformed from the blood of her own body.”

Hsuan Hua (Chinese: 宣化; pinyin: Xuānhuà; literally “proclaim and transform”; April 16, 1918 – June 7, 1995), also known as An Tzu and Tu Lun, was a Chan(Zen) Buddhist monk and a contributing figure in bringing Chinese Buddhism to the United States in the 20th century.